I have recently launched a content network targetted campaign, and have found that google has charged me for 161 clicks today, however all of my reporting (of which I have a database and third party tool) is reporting only 61 unique visitors and 64 visitors. Has anyone had any similar experiences where it seems that these figures are inflated? I have been advertising with google for a number of months and this is the first I have seen of this?
Check if both (adwords and tool) has the same time zone setting. Also check if the tool has no delay in report. In the end I would not trust in the third party tool.
I have verified this with both my own database tool where I log the ip address of the user, and the third party tool, and these two match. The number is now up to 201 on google, and the tools are still displaying the same number of users? I really can't understand this?
I am using the third party statcounter tool which I think seems fairly well respected, and works well across all my other sites. I also just use some fairly straight forward logging of ip address and other fields via server variables and these again seem fairly accurate. I use adwords fairly extensively, however this is the first instance I have seen of this, I may start watching more closely to see if any of my other sites are affected. It would be interesting to see if there were many others experiencing similar issues, in which case there could be a minor bug within the adwords software, which is resulting in a higher cost being represented than what should in fact be the case.
I never had such problem with Adwords. as I told you: the only way to know what is going on is you to check your server logs for this date.
They could be fraudulent. It happened to me many times with other PPC companies like Kanoodle. They bill a huge amount of clicks, not even showing up in logs.